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Book Review: Shadows in Flight, by Orson Scott Card

(Early warning here: I'm basically reviewing all the "Ender" books here.  It veers toward verbose, so be prepared.)

Quite a number of years ago, I asked a friend what science fiction books I should read in order to be more sci-fi literate.  He recommended Dune and Ender's Game.  Since he actually had a copy of Ender's Game, I read it immediately and wondered how I'd gone so long without reading it.

It was some time later that I discovered Speaker for the Dead on audio, purely by chance.  I followed that with Xenocide on audio (not my favorite audio production, especially compared with Speaker), but had to pick up Children of the Mind in paperback because the audio version wasn't available at the library.  (By the way, my favorite xkcd comic is about the Speaker series.)

Needless to say, I loved the series, though the peak for me was with Speaker for the Dead.  So I was reluctant to pick up Ender's Shadow, knowing that it covered basically the same ground as Ender's Game, but following the adventures of Bean rather than Ender.  Now, I always liked Bean, but I didn't love him like I did Ender.

Of course, Orson Scott Card has a way of making you love his characters, and I quickly developed an attachment to Bean, and by the end of the series, I loved him.  But what surprised me was that I also warmed to Peter Wiggen, Ender's sadistic brother.  Go figure! 

The two series are very different.  The Speaker series is broader in scope and tends to be a bit more philosophical, dealing with Ender's continuing work of redeeming his role in the Third Formic War, taking us far into the future as he travels the Hundred Worlds at near light speed.  (Here I'll try to stay spoiler-free, but the best remedy for fearing spoilers is for you to just go read these books.  All of them.  Seriously, folks.) 

The Shadow series takes place in the immediate aftermath of Ender's Shadow (an important distinction, since Shadow actually takes place over a shorter period) and follows the exploits of Bean and the rest of Ender's "jeesh," the other children who were important officers in the war.  The books deal more in geo-politics and military strategy, but don't let that deter you.  The plot is very well conceived and developed, and on the whole I actually prefer the Shadow series, though Speaker is still my favorite single book.

In anticipation of the release of Shadows in Flight, the latest Bean-centric release, I picked up Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, and Shadow of the Giant on audio from Library2Go.  Just to brush up, you understand.  I believe I've now taken in each book three times, and they're still awesome.  As a mini-review of the audio versions, I'll say that the music included for chapter transitions is really, really, really bad.  I'm not really sure how that happened when they pulled all the right levers for the Speaker series (though, to be fair, I think the Speaker series audio productions are actually newer).

The narrators are, of course, very good, though I have one other minor gripe.  I remember listening to Shadow of the Hegemon (on tape, no less), and noting the inconsistent pronunciation of "Hegemon," with some of the narrators going with a hard 'G' and others more of a 'J' sound.  So imagine my surprise when I picked it up on CD some time later and found that the producers had dubbed in the correct ('J') pronunciation later, to pretty hilariously lame effect.  (It's just not realistic to think even a narrator as brilliant as Scott Brick is going to be in exactly the same voice five years down the road.)

You may be wondering why I've spent nearly six hundred words writing about previous books in the series when this is ostensibly a review of Shadows in Flight.  Well, the answer is that there's really not that much to say about it.  It's short, it's sweet, and it ties up some loose ends from Shadow of the Giant.

Actually, Orson Scott Card has been promising to tie the two series together for some time now.  He's done bits and pieces of it, with a few scenes in Ender in Exile and some references in this latest book, but he's evidently still planning One Book to Join Them All at some point in the near future.  Looking forward to that!

I'll veer into Spoiler Space here for a few moments, after I mention that next I'll be reviewing The Fellowship of the Ring and The Scarlet Pimpernel.  So if you're not afraid of spoilers, read on.

Of course, Bean set out at the end of Shadow of the Giant in a near light speed ship with his three children who shared his genetic anomaly.  Part of the reason was to extend his life, given that his huge stature was going to kill him in the very near future, and being free of gravity would allow him to continue to grow awhile without threatening his heart.  The other angle was that this would allow decades and centuries to pass on earth while scientists looked for a cure for Anton Syndrome.  Bean wanted his children to be able to have normal lives and not grow beyond their bodies' ability to cope with their size.

So this book takes up that story several years into the future, but it'd be fairly boring to just look in on Bean (or as the children call him, "The Giant") and his kids, so they're given something to do.  They encounter a ship and realize it's likely Formic in nature.  But aren't all the Buggers dead?

The interactions of the children are interesting, because they're all basically Bean but without Rotterdam.  How would that look?  Like him, they tend to be thinkers and not feelers, so how would they deal with their inconvenient and dying father?  Would they all be experts at everything, or would they specialize in particular areas of study?  Would they, like Bean, be basically lacking in ambition, or was that a product of his upbringing?

Of course, the most important question is this: Is a cure possible?  If not, what does Bean want the children to do with the rest of their short lives?

It's definitely a bittersweet book (as Becky at Becky's Book Reviews pointed out to me), because you know going in that Bean is close to death.  (In fairness, he was close at the end of Shadow of the Giant.)  But it's worth it to get a glimpse of the rest of the story.  I'm not sure it's a book I'll read over and over like the rest of the series, but we'll see.

And now I'm leaving Spoiler Space and heading into Here There Be Dragons of Spoilers Space.  Read on only if you've read the book or don't plan to….

…seriously…

Okay.  The really cool bits in the book were those about the Formics themselves, because we learn a few things that we didn't previously know.  We're introduced to two new Formic species, including the drone, previously unseen except for perhaps a brief moment in Xenocide, in which little description was given them.  All other Formics encountered in other books (except the Gold Bug in Ender in Exile) were worker females or the Hive Queen herself.  So meeting the drones was nifty-keen.

However, it's interesting that Mr. Card decided to throw a bit of a monkey wrench into the whole development of the Hive Queen as seen in the Speaker series as a whole.  I'm not totally sure what he was going for, though I have to admit he deftly avoided needing to retcon anything in future editions of those books.  He introduces the idea of the independent will of the workers and drones, a concept only lightly touched in the Speaker series, and makes a bit of hay with it, then avoids having to deal with it by making sure the rest of the Hundred Worlds won't ever learn the secret.  Was it a copout?  Hmm.  Not sure.  Discuss.

Well, I've rambled long enough.  You might be able to tell that the Ender books are among my favorites in the world, and I still have Speaker for the Dead as my favorite novel.  Though I do need to go back and read Shogun again and see if it can take the title back…